Why Your ADHD Child Can't Wait to Open the Presents
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It isn't greed and it isn't impatience. For a lot of ADHD children the hit is in the unwrapping, not in whatever is inside — which means a pile of presents under the tree for a week isn't exciting. It's an unfinished job in the middle of the living room that they have been asked to ignore.
Once you can see it that way, the whole of December gets easier. It also gets cheaper, which nobody mentions.
What is actually going on
Watch a child with the paper. The best bit is the tearing, the not-knowing, the second before. Whatever is inside gets about ninety seconds and then it's on the floor and they are looking round for the next one.
That isn't a child who doesn't appreciate things. It's a brain that gets its reward from the anticipation and the reveal rather than from the object, and the object was never the point.
The trouble is what that does to a wrapped parcel left in the room. For most brains it's a nice thing in the corner you glance at now and then. For this one it's an open loop — a thing started and not finished, in your own house, that you are being told to walk past four hundred times.
That isn't a child being asked to be patient. It's a child being asked to hold a tab open for a week.
The year we put them out early
I did this. Last year.
Before the children, the money went on us. Not on anything memorable — just steadily, all year, until December came round and there was nothing left for it. That was normal for a long time and I would not have called it a problem.
Then I got better at it. Notes, planners, an actual system. For the next few years I only saved for our daughter.
When our son came along we started putting money away in January, the week Christmas finished, and last year was the first one where there was enough for all four of us.
The children's come from Santa, so theirs were never going under the tree. What went out was ours — mine and my husband's, for each other. The first year we'd had enough to do that. I wanted the picture of it. A tree with something underneath it.
They went out about a week before Christmas.
She asked about them within the hour. Then she asked again. Then she asked at every single point the subject could be made to connect to them. It was not naughtiness and it was not nagging — it was a brain that had locked onto something unfinished and genuinely could not put it down, and there is only so long you can ask a small person to sit in a room with that.
So she helped us open them.
That was how she put it. She'd pick one up, hand it over, and then look at you and ask — can I help you? Every time. And of course she could.
Ours, all of them, in the lead-up, one at a time, before the day they were meant for.
I don't regret it, exactly. She loved it. But it did mean that by the time Christmas came, our presents were gone.
And it didn't even fix it
On Christmas morning she opened hers. Then her brother's, because he was six months old and entirely unbothered. Then she asked what else there was.
Then she started asking when we were going to Nanny and Grandad's. Not to see them. So she could open more.
A whole morning of it and she was still looking for the next one. Which told me I'd had it the wrong way round. I'd been thinking of it as a child who couldn't wait. It isn't about waiting. The opening is the thing, and it doesn't fill up.
The person nobody noticed
Here is the part I keep coming back to.
She asked him too. Every time. And he said yes, every time.
By Christmas morning he had nothing of his own left to open. I watched his face while she did it, and he liked the opening too. The same thing, exactly as much as she did.
He gave it up so she could have it. He didn't announce it, I don't think he decided it, and I am not certain he noticed he had done it. He has ADHD as well — diagnosed as an adult, which means he spent about twenty-five years not knowing that half of what he wanted things for was the moment just before he got them.
Everybody writes about ADHD children at Christmas. Nobody writes about the adult standing at the edge of it who is also waiting for something to open and will not say so, because grown-ups are supposed to have got over wanting things.
And there is a second half to this that I have thought about more than the first. Last year was also the first time we had enough money to buy for each other, and when it came to it we could not think what to get. Not because there was nothing either of us wanted. Because neither of us had been in the habit of knowing.
If there is one thing in this post worth taking away, it is that.
What we are doing differently this year
None of this costs more. Most of it costs less.
Nothing goes under the tree until Christmas Eve
Not as a punishment and not as a test of willpower. You are simply not leaving an unfinished job in the room for seven days. The tree can have lights on it and nothing underneath and it is still a tree.
More things, smaller, wrapped separately
If the opening is the part that matters, then five small wrapped things beat one expensive thing in a box. This is the bit that saves money rather than spending it. Satsumas count. A pair of socks counts.
Everybody has a pile, including the grown-ups
Even if what's in it is nothing much. The point is that nobody in the room is sitting there watching other people do the good bit.
The keen one can help — after their own
She can absolutely open her brother's, and she will, and it will be the highlight. But she does hers first, so the helping is a bonus rather than a swap.
Spread the day out
They don't all have to happen before breakfast. A pile in the morning and a pile after lunch is two good moments instead of one that's over by half past eight.
If this is your first Christmas since a diagnosis
You will probably spend some of December noticing things you didn't have words for before, and feeling a bit odd about the years you didn't know.
Leave that where it is for now. The useful version of what you've learnt is small and practical and it mostly looks like this: work out what the thing is actually for, and then give them more of that and less of everything else.
Start here
The same thinking runs through everything we make: decide it in advance, on a good day, so there is nothing to work out when the day itself arrives and everyone is tired.
Our free Dopamine Menus are the smallest place to start — forty-two things that genuinely lift you, written down before you need them, with a version for children alongside the grown-ups' one.
And if you want the whole system we run this house on, it's in The ADHD Operating System.